Hamid performs globalization’s manipulation of authorship through failed writer Erica

Evidence

Hamid is, then, in some respects critiquing the globalizing of media and culture that his own novel is a part of. Yet he also attempts to mitigate the functionalist view through a renewed attention to story making. The Reluctant Fundamentalist in fact performs the manipulation of literature through globalization via its consideration of authorship and the literary. This manipulation can first be seen in the fate of the novel’s creative writer, Erica. We could say that Erica represents the unsuccessful writer, the one who fails to reconcile herself to contemporary market realities. Her excitement at acquiring a literary agent is not at first tempered by his warning that the novella—her preferred form—is “a platypus of a beast” and notoriously difficult to market (87). Yet as her psychological problems mount, she can no longer find refuge in writing and ignores her agent’s calls: “I used to turn to it, my writing, when I needed to get something out that was stuck inside. But I can’t get it out now. It pulls me in, you know? I dwell on it instead of writing it” (111–12). Finally, after her disappearance, when Changez brings himself to read her manuscript, his disappointment is palpable: “I could not locate Erica in the rhythms or sounds of what she had written; it seemed a mistake” (166). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 462

Categorization

• XREF: Direct hinge material: Erica as the writer who cannot reconcile with market realities is a foil against which to read Changez (and by extension Hamid himself) as the writer who does reconcile.
• DEEPTHINKING: The layered gesture — Hamid both critiques the globalizing commodification of literature and performs/manipulates it via Erica’s failure while succeeding himself — is the kind of reflexive tension central to reading Hamid as contesting rather than reinforcing Islamophobia.
• SEED: Could underwrite an essay section asking whether Changez (succeeding storyteller) versus Erica (blocked writer) encodes Hamid’s own ambivalence about writing the commodified Muslim story.